I love to write, and since I just yesterday finished drafting out a new book – and having a great time doing so! – a comment by C. S. Lewis reminded me that I should not claim to be doing some great act of self-surrender whenever I crank up the laptop. To paraphrase Plutarch from his Moralia, it is in doing the difficult, not the easy, that we measure our level of commitment.
Still, whatever we do, it by God’s grace, and should be laid before him as an offering, whether it cost us little or much!
Here is the gem in C. S. Lewis’ Problem of Pain, chapter VI this weekend. He writes:
How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like, I know very well from my own experience at the moment. When I undertook to WRITE THIS BOOK I hoped that the will to obey what might be a ‘leading’ had at least some place in my motives. But now that I am thoroughly Immersed in it, it has become a temptation rather than a duty. I may still hope that the writing of the book is, in fact, in conformity with God’s will: but to contend that I am learning to surrender myself by doing what is so attractive to me would be ridiculous.
My book-in-progress, by the way, will God willing be published in Spanish by Publicaciones Kerigma. The title, in English, is a collection of my writings under the umbrella, When the Comforter Comes: Essays on the gifts of the Spirit and his power in the church. One way or another it will at some point be available also in English.
Open Our Eyes, Lord! 